Session Report for August 5, 2004

As much as I love vacations, especially gaming ones, cramming in activities and staying up repeatedly into the wee hours takes its toll. After stepping off the plane in Austin at a dead run that is only barely letting up, I was pretty tired tonight and planning to only play light, familiar games. It didn’t help that Ed had to take Kevin to soccer camp, leaving me with all the preparation and hosting duties. Ah well, even a tired junky will go to great lengths to get her fix. And that’s even after overdosing at Gulf Games 14 last week. (Stay tuned: report on that fabulous event is in the works.)

Einfach Genial was first up on the table for me. Whew. I know this one and the bit of thinking involved is not enough to overload my tired brain. Clark walked in the door just in time to get in the game and make it a four-player partnership. This is by far the best way to play this game. Our partnership games have been close, tense matches that go down to the wire with heavy defensive play towards the end. This game was no exception. Jon and I thought we were getting creamed, but we were able to squeak out the comeback at the end for a 5 – 4 win against Clark and Doug.

I made a beeline for the kitchen to sample what was left of a fabulous bean/salsa dip that Roxana made (Note to self: must get that recipe). When I returned to the table, the others were deciding on Liberté as the next selection. Yikes. So much for an easy evening of light fillers. That’s what I get for being greedy with the food.

Unfortunately, none of us were really familiar with the rules. Mark had played it last, so he started slogging through a rules refresher with much interrupting and many questions from the rest of us. I’d played it once over two years ago, and remembered being in a total fog during the game, but coming away with an overall good impression of it. Well, this time around was as foggy as the first. We really, REALLY, need to get these games with high learning curves to the table more frequently.

I think one of my problems with Liberté is that it requires one to be able to quickly analyze the board so that you can predict the election outcome and scoring. I just wasn’t able to see this tonight, no doubt partly due to my fatigue. Well, I hope that’s one of the reasons, anyway. We have vowed to play it again in the very near future. This playing was also weird in that there wasn’t as much fighting over provinces as last time. The first two turns were practically identical, with everyone taking the same cards back in their hands and playing them again on the second turn. We barely even cracked into the “B” deck of cards. I remember a whole lot of card turnover in my first game.

Ugh, look at the final scores to see my shameful performance:

Doug 15, Mark 14, Clark/Mike 12, Susan 4

As a final nightcap, we played a quick game of Trendy. Fortunately, I can play that game on autopilot, which pretty much described my mental functioning at this point in the evening.

Results: Mark 121, Susan 113, Mike 103, Doug 84

Other games played:

Power Grid – AGAIN, and without me. I still have yet to play this, although I have played Funkenschlag. I probably couldn’t have handled it tonight, anyway.
Das Letzte Paradies – Mark, Collector of All Things Knizia, brought this obscure auction game. It is very short and very evil, apparently. They played two games of it during our one game of Einfach Genial.
Rome: Circus Maximus

That’s it. No pictures this week. PhotoMan Ed wasn’t here until the very end and I was too lazy to break out the camera myself.

Posted by Susan Rozmiarek at August 6, 2004 12:30 AM